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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. If you want to sell newspapers or advertising on TV, or draw eyeballs to internet stories, nothing beats a political sex scandal. And the immediate interest among the public isn't just about who's doing what to whom. It's the whole cultural stew of what the scandal says about the individual, his or her political party, and society as a whole. It's a ratings winner through and through. But does the media treat sex scandals differently when it's a Democrat versus a Republican, and do their different constituencies react differently when their politician is in the media crosshairs? Today on the show, you'll hear from a University of Oregon professor who studies media history and political scandal, and gives her take on what's happening throughout history and today.
Political sex scandals are nothing new, but media coverage has changed over the years. Professor Gretchen Soderlund is a professor of media history at the School of Journalism and Communications at the University of Oregon. Professor, thanks so much for coming in and talking with us.
Gretchen Soderlund: Thank you, and thanks for inviting me.
Dunne: We're talking in the shadow of the recent announcement that the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine is stepping down, Graham Platner, following a sexual scandal involving issues from his past. The question I want to ask you, especially since you study media coverage as well as the politics of our day and history, is whether there's a difference between when a Democratic candidate gets caught up in a sexual scandal versus a Republican candidate. What have you seen in history, and what do you see now?
Soderlund: It would certainly appear that way at this juncture, but I'd argue there have been other moments in history when the tables were turned a bit. One need only look back to Bill Clinton and his sky-high approval ratings in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal to see that there have been moments when Democrats, or certain Democrats, seemed inoculated against sexual scandals.
Dunne: And certainly in the Clinton situation, it was front-page coverage, especially when front pages meant something back in the '90s. It was a huge scandal, and a lot of Democrats came to his defense. But I'm glad you brought up President Clinton, because I guess we can also juxtapose that with our current president. For those who don't know, which I'm sure is very few people, President Clinton eventually confessed to a sexual relationship with a 21-year-old intern, Monica Lewinsky. He had already been reelected, so this wasn't going to upend a second term; that had already occurred.
Now fast-forward to today, and to President Trump. Many people will remember the case involving E. Jean Carroll, where he was found liable for, I believe, sexual abuse and defamation. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan explicitly stated that while the jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse rather than the state's technical definition of rape, the jury's finding of forcible digital penetration was legally tantamount to the common definition of rape. President Trump was reelected, and he still has tremendous support among Republicans. Could you compare and contrast those two cases? Thirty years passed between those two episodes.
Soderlund: Absolutely, it does. I was thinking about this before coming into the studio, and I think the pivotal moment in this history is the Clarence Thomas hearings.
Dunne: Sure, the Supreme Court nominee at the time.
Soderlund: Yes. Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment in the workplace, and this was really the moment when allegations of sexual misconduct, whether about consensual affairs, sexual harassment, or rape, became framed as sexual politics rather than sexual morality, which had really been the copyrighted property of the Republican Party before that moment. I think what you've seen since is a slow shift toward a situation in which Democrats are much more responsive to claims of sexual impropriety now than Republicans, to the point where it's almost a badge of honor on the Republican side to have a past full of allegations.
Dunne: In fact, as I was doing some research, I came across Brian Tyler Cohen. He's a pundit who appears on CNN sometimes. I think today he said something along the lines of, and let me try to get this right, that sexual abuse or predatory behavior has become not only not disqualifying, but something of a prerequisite in the GOP. Is that really the case, or is it more that a Republican constituency is simply more forgiving of a politician who does something a lot of us would consider pretty terrible?
Soderlund: When it comes to Republicans at this moment, because these claims are framed in terms of sexual politics, larger gendered politics, Republicans seem to be able to effectively make the case to their party and their base that these are always already politically motivated attacks rather than actual transgressions or crimes, and that seems to be very effective. On the other hand, when claims of sexual misconduct against a Democrat reach a certain point in the media, it seems as though both Democrats and Republicans pile on, as if that politician were a fumbled football.
Dunne: Is some of this due to, and again, in doing some research, I saw a study, I believe in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, showing that for Republicans, the woman accuser is often believed less than when something similar happens involving a Democrat. What's your thought on that?
Soderlund: Oh, absolutely. I think right now the Republican Party is putting its entire bet in the male-privilege bucket, essentially gambling that women accusers, across the board, won't be believed. There was the case of Tony Gonzales in Texas, where the woman he'd had an affair with self-immolated, and Republicans were still standing by him, though that seemed to be a bridge too far for some. Even Gonzales didn't resign until Swalwell had stepped out of the governor's race in California.
Dunne: Eric Swalwell. So I'm wondering, too, in terms of media coverage, I want to get to this idea that a lot of people, mostly on the left right now since they tend to be the party out of power, a lot of pundits, especially left-leaning ones, say that the Beltway and the national media practice what they call both-siderism. If a Republican does something wrong or controversial, the argument goes, the media feels it needs to find something comparable on the other side that a Democrat has done, even if it's a much lower bar of transgression, just to appear balanced. Do you think that goes on, and do you think it's a detriment to the public that consumes journalism?
Soderlund: Do I think there's a kind of fundamental unfairness in that sense?
Dunne: Yes, that's part of the question, a fundamental unfairness in that Democratic transgressions don't reach the same level or draw the same scrutiny. Let's start there. If you're a politician of either party and you do something wrong, do you think the media will find out and go after you regardless?
Soderlund: I think that is the case. I don't want to suggest there aren't plenty of Democrats of poor character. There's a sense in which I'd like there to be more discussion of individual morality and character, because anytime you have politicians, powerful people, candidates, you're going to find men, and to a lesser degree women, taking advantage of that power. I think the historical record suggests both Democrats and Republicans have transgressed in various ways.
Dunne: Was there a time when the media wouldn't go after a politician over a potential sex scandal, when that was considered taboo? I know throughout history, a lot of people have pointed to John F. Kennedy as someone who may have had affairs that people didn't really talk about. Is that accurate?
Soderlund: Oh, absolutely. My dearly departed Republican grandmother used to rail against John F. Kennedy and say that this country went down the drain when John F. Kennedy brought sluts into the White House. But those were just rumors that circulated. He was never adjudicated in the media or in the court of public opinion for the affairs he may have had with Marilyn Monroe. So yes, sex scandals taking down candidates, senators and presidents is a much more recent phenomenon.
Dunne: You brought up the Clarence Thomas hearings and Anita Hill. Was that the starting point, or is it also true that Watergate cast aside some of the grandeur of the White House and the presidency, so that reporters became more willing to go after a president or high-ranking official? What's your read: is it more the Clarence Thomas era, or does it go back further, to Watergate in the early 1970s?
Soderlund: Certainly, Watergate. In its wake, journalists did more investigative reporting around the presidency. You had reporters looking for anything they could find about candidates, and also political parties and machines looking for dirt on other candidates. So it's possible Watergate opened the floodgates, in a sense, for broader conversations about the moral character of the presidency.
Dunne: Much has been made of the fact that Trump seems able to say and do things other politicians couldn't. I've also heard people say that because he's such a different kind of candidate and leader, and because there's such a huge volume of norm-breaking, it's a harder task than ever for the media covering this president and this White House.
Soderlund: Absolutely. You also have a very different media ecosystem now. There's a formidable right-wing media system that explains away and rationalizes what this president does, and you've got the internet. Reporters are working in a very different landscape than they were in the past. It's also the case that Biden, for instance, would not have been able to do a fraction of the things Trump has done and gotten away with it, Hunter Biden's briefcase notwithstanding.
Dunne: It's funny, because I've seen people try to hold Biden to task by pointing to what his son did, trying to equate that with what the current president is doing, and I find that troubling. And speaking of troubling, as someone who obviously cares a great deal about journalism, are you concerned that after Trump is out of office, the coarseness and obfuscation people often say he's mastered will continue and really change journalism, maybe not for the better?
Soderlund: Oh, yeah. There's a concept in communications called the firehose of propaganda, where you make a lot of false claims and just fire away to see what sticks. I think something similar is happening when it comes to scandal. There's really a firehose of scandal occurring, and to some degree it's a strategy. If the scandals come at such a rate that something that happened a week ago feels like it happened six months ago, it's going to be hard for the public, or for the media, to ever seize on a single transgression and adjudicate it the way it should be adjudicated.
Dunne: That makes sense, and it brings me to maybe my last question, because there's a scandal in this White House that's like a yo-yo. It comes into consciousness, then goes out, then comes back in. Of course, that's Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. It's such a horrible thing, indefensible on so many levels, and both parties, the Republicans among the most vociferous, have complained about the sexual exploitation of children. So both sides of the aisle agree Jeffrey Epstein was a terrible person, and yet it's such a long-standing scandal, involving so many powerful people and so many moving parts, that people have a hard time getting their arms around it. Is it that people are tired of it, or is it just too complicated for people to grasp?
Soderlund: That's a great question. It is true that Trump rode QAnon and made claims about a hidden pedophilia ring, what they called Pizzagate, and in their telling, Trump was going to be the savior who came into office and broke up that ring. So Trump really did ride those claims, which were essentially about Jeffrey Epstein, into the White House. But it turns out he has much closer and more suspect ties to Epstein than that story suggested. I think he's mentioned more than a million times in the Epstein files. The Trump administration has had a hard time explaining that away, and what we're seeing now are fault lines within MAGA itself, with figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson. So I don't think the Epstein scandal is too unwieldy, or that it's gone away. I think it's going to keep mutating, and MAGA is going to shift because of it. We just don't know how yet.
Dunne: The media has a critical role in shaping the legacy of a president. When Trump leaves office, what do you think the media's first draft of his legacy might be?
Soderlund: That's a difficult question to answer, because it depends on whether the United States makes what's called an autocratic U-turn. Many countries do: they dabble in autocracy, then shift and strengthen democratic norms in the aftermath. If that happens in the next election, I think the media's postmortem will look very different than if J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio is our next president.
Dunne: A difficult question, but I appreciate you trying. She is Gretchen Soderlund, professor of media history at the University of Oregon. Thank you so much for coming in and talking with us.
Soderlund: Thank you so much for having me.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Tomorrow on the show: with more of us driving fuel-efficient cars and EVs, our gas taxes aren't keeping up with demand. We talk to the assistant director of ODOT about the impact of lower gas tax revenue on our roads and bridges. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
